Football makes logocidal maniacs of many of us. Blame it on media training, blame it on journalistic laziness, but players and press have a history of murdering language. Occasionally it is a mistimed challenge resulting in minor injury to a word, but every so often you get a horror tackle which basically results in a piece of vocabulary being forced to hang up its boots. I can't help feeling John Terry and the Football Association ended the career of "fronting up to it" this week.

Despite the fact he is being investigated by the Metropolitan police and the FA itself, Terry was the player fielded by the governing body for a press conference ahead of Tuesday's Sweden game. "It is about being captain and coming out and facing up to it," ran a mantra on which Terry appeared to have multiple variations as the week wore on. "I am here, fronting it up and dealing with it." And yet, given that the one thing Terry wasn't allowed to talk about was "it", and that extra security had been laid on at his press conferences as if to underscore that point, the spectacle merely served as a death knell for the phrase "fronting up".

The definition of "duty" may well be next. Terry believes all manner of things to be his "duty" as England captain. Yet, as frequently mentioned in this space, to be England captain is to occupy a position as important as that of a regimental goat. Within the confines of that role, Terry's duties include things like wearing the dress harness (an armband in his case), and not making unsightly deposits when on parade. There's really nothing in the rubric about not having a thing with someone who used to go out with someone who used to be your team-mate – not that you'd know it to hear some of the irrelevant indignation – and there certainly isn't anything about the noble business of having to "front up" in a series of parodically hamstrung press conferences, because if there were it would debase the notion of "duty" so far that it would implode.

Others have already gone. We lost "passion" yonks ago – or rather it suffered a seismic semantic upheaval, and now directly equates to long balls to so-called target men, and a tactical grasp bordering on the remedial. Look up "passion" in the Very Concise Indeed Football Dictionary and there is that picture of a wild-eyed, head-bandaged Terry Butcher, his shirt drenched in blood and sweat and bulldog spirit and guts and character, and all the other substitutes for technique that have mostly not powered England into the business end of tournaments.

"Trust" was the casualty after the last World Cup, when the FA issued a press release – apparently drafted by Relate – which declared: "We accept it is going to take time to rebuild the trust with the fans." A statement which so mischaracterised the nature of the relationship between any supporters and their national side that it threatened to subsume all legitimate definitions of trust into its black hole of idiocy. As for "respect", the sheer volume of senior players who appoint themselves unofficial fourth officials every week at the same time as larding their public statements with platitudes about "respect" suggests that one is officially six feet under.

Of course, sports hacks have killed off many more words than footballers in their time, a crime not excused by their half-arsed attempts to replenish the pot by making up witless new ones, like "wantaway" and "boo-boys". Indeed, thanks to the ministrations of Her Majesty's press, some words and phrases are now marginally less meaningful than a collection of random keystrokes made by a woodpecker. Someone being "set to" do something is as likely not to do it as to do it. See also "mind games", a phrase which might once have denoted the complex game theorising of the cold war, or that bit in The Twits where all their furniture is glued to the ceiling so that the couple believe themselves to be upside down. It is now deployed when Sir Alex Ferguson makes even passing reference to a match official.

Where will it end? Some argue that the rise of the Christian right in America has led to the secular definitions of words like "life" and "liberty" being replaced by new ones, and there are times when it feels as if football is waging a similar war on meaning. Perhaps ours is not to reason why – ours is merely to commemorate the fallen. So, RIP "fronting up". You left us too soon.